Foxfire: Confessions of a Girl Gang Book

Reviewer: Ellie Reasoner (Cincinnati, Ohio, USA) - See all my reviews A member of a 1950's girl gang from upstate New York defies her blood oath and breaks the code of silence after forty years. She describes the time and place of the gang's formation and reveals who the others in the group with her were. She then tells secrets. At first the activities of Foxfire, the name of a club and later a gang, begin almost innocently but its deeds become more and more serious. The narrator reveals how this group of teenaged girls from the wrong side of the tracks in a down on its heels Great Lakes factory town became involved in "hooking" vulnerable, sexually-perverse men and playing on their fears of public exposure to exploit them for money. She informs us of Foxfire's involvement in lodging violence against those branded public enemies, and tells of the gang's Robin Hood like deeds of good will on behalf of the poor and out of luck. She also tells how things begin to go wrong even as the ambitions of Legs, the streetwise leader of the girls, plots the kidnapping of a millionaire industrialist. Oates produced Foxfire in a five-year stretch of particularly dark novels that included Zombie, and Black Water. By the mid-nineties she wrote one of her most publicly well-received works, We Were The Mulvaney's, and seemed for a time to emerge into a lighter vein of fiction, but for this novel at least, Oates' pessimistic theme of society diminishing the spirit of those who do not conform to it rings loud and clear.Read More